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Observations and Information on Ballroom dancing by John Pattillo

Feb. 2012  -  "Just Direct Your Feet"

     (orig. puiblished in Topline, The Journal of the U.S.I.S.T.D.)

           As the song has it, “Just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street!”  In our line of work, we are always telling people how to direct their feet, but many of them seem to struggle at it, for a very long time.  Can it be done better, more quickly?  I think so.  The fault lies in our not getting our pupils to understand the basis of these modern dances.

           Modern???  Well, yes, they were called modern at one time.  Now they are called “Standard”.  They were called “modern” because they introduced a new method of social dance – based on walking, a so-called “natural” way of moving, in contrast to the older, ballet-based method.  Now, walking is in fact natural and easy until you put another body in close proximity in front of you, facing you, and ask you to walk in such a way as to co-ordinate four (yes, four) foot actions – yours and your partner’s – so as not to maim each other.

          In this position, it is no longer easy, or natural.  It now requires you to exercise great care in the way you place your feet, the way you direct your leg swing, and the timing of the action.  It is this care that is most lacking in so many dancers.  They just plop their feet down in the general direction they have been taught, but with no awareness of the mutual placement of four feet.

          This is where it is enormously helpful to insist that you learn how to walk with another person – even if you are an advanced dancer.  You can make a lot of fun out of this drill if you do it as the “Castle Walk”.   (It’s really a kick if you can locate a copy of the original music for this dance, a piece called “Too Much Mustard”).  This one-time “fad” dance, with all its silly gaiety, in addition to making you very aware of the placement of your feet, will require you to learn about Contrary Body Movement, which will in turn require you to relax your hold, to permit mutual flexibility which will lay the groundwork for another big improvement – elimination of a rigid top.

          If you take a step further, by walking with C. B. M. on each step, while keeping your spines each juxtaposed leftwards, you will lay another great foundation stone – the fundamental position of your body in relation to your partner – for all time.

          It will further require you to really direct your feet, and your legs.  You will find that there is only one way to do this, and the discovery will suddenly produce something very rarely seen today – “stylish feet.”  This is virtually impossible to describe briefly, but it involves suppleness of ankle and knee while trying to walk, in effect, “on a tightrope.”

          There is not a single modern dance which will not benefit from learning to walk properly.  The inimitable Ms. Josephine Bradley even commented that, in the early days, everyone kept right on walking even when a Waltz was played.  This should give us a clue how important this walking business was in the revolutionizing of the dance; the older Waltz had no element of walking in line with one’s partner.

          In any event, even if you try a little bit of this walking, you will find that you “leave your troubles on the doorstep.”

Feb. 2009 -- “Syncopation rules the nation”

     (orig. published in Dance Beat)  

              “Syncopation rules the nation, you can’t get away from it.”  So went the refrain of a popular song in the early days of the twentieth century’s love affair with syncopated music.

              Syncopation – the unexpected, unpredictable shifting of accents within and across the bars of music – is really the whole ball game for the kind of pop music we dance to, and have for two centuries.   “Unexpected” and “unpredictable” are the key features.

              Here we are in the beginning of the twenty-first century.   We are inheritors of ragtime, jazz, swing, rumba, mambo, salsa, all of which use extensive and sophisticated syncopation.   So it may seem strange to think that that staid old chestnut of the ballroom – the waltz – was also considered to be syncopated.  But it was.   The two great creators of the ballroom waltz were Josef Lanner and Johann Strauss, Sr.    Of Strauss, it was said that “his strong points were his racy, irresistible rhythms, and the great élan with which he imparted to his waltzes by piquant syncopations, dotted figures and an abundance of trills and ‘wrong’ accents” (Mosco Cramer, The Waltz).   In a good ballroom waltz of today (of which there are few), you can still hear some of these rhythmic features, though not the raciness.

              “Wrong” accents – that really says it all.   To work its magic, a syncopated rhythm must fall unpredictably on the ear.   It must sound fresh and not according to a formula.   A syncopation that repeats itself endlessly becomes stale and boring.   The marvelous thing is that a good foxtrot, or cha cha, for example sounds fresh in this rhythmic way, even if you have heard it before, because of the inventiveness and variety of the syncopation.

              Since dancing is inspired by music, unpredictable accents led to unpredictable dancing – that is, an improvisational, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, change-the-expected-sequence type of dancing.   In other words, social or ballroom dancing of the twentieth – and now the twenty-first -- century.

              Just as a listener does not know where the accent will fall next, so the viewer – or the partner – or the dancer himself does not know what dance accent, or what figure, or what movement will occur next.   The music and the dance go hand in glove.

              Try listening for these “wrong” accents; you can incorporate their rhythmic feel into your dancing, as if you were a member of the dance band -- but instead of playing an instrument you syncopate with your feet and your body!

              “Syncopation rules the nation, you can’t get away from it.”

Jan., 2009 -- What We Teach

              Ballroom dancing.

              There are not so many “ballrooms” today, but no matter.   What it means is this: any type of dancing with couples all on the floor at the same time, men leading women in an improvised flow of movements, each couple respecting the others’ space by means of their mastery of the art of leading and following.   It can be done in an old-fashioned ballroom, a latin club, or a floor the size of a cocktail napkin.

              Ballroom dancing includes dances that travel all around the space available – foxtrot, waltz, tango, quickstep, Viennese waltz, Peabody, paso doble, samba.   And dances that stay, or may stay, in one fairly small area – salsa, rumba, cha cha, swing (in all its variations), merengue, samba, tango, foxtrot, bachata, mambo, bolero.   Notice that some dances may do both.

              Do you have to learn to lead or follow to do ballroom dancing?   No...you can learn a fixed sequence...but you will find it hard to cope on the dance floor if there is another couple besides yourself, and harder still if there are many.   This is the amazing thing about ballroom dancing -- scores of dancers can coexist peaceably if they have learned what they should; if not, they are, to put it kindly, a menace.   And if they only know sequences, they will miss out on the tremendous fun of improvising with their partner the flow of movement to the delicious syncopated music we dance to.

              Dancing memorized groupings of figures, sequence dancing, round dancing, formation dancing may all be developed from ballroom dancing, but are best done in a special environment where everyone on the floor accepts the same rules of the game.   And memorizing a routine may sometimes be the best way to survive your first wedding dance.

              But, in the meantime, don’t repeat the same tired formulas over and again.   As Roxanne said to Christian in Cyrano de Bergerac: “You have your theme -- improvise! Rhapsodize!”

 

Summer 2010  A Story Worth Reading

  "I was thoroughly depressed.  It was 1981 and I had just been through a very bad personal relationship and could not quite find myself.  I was insecure around women since my break up and was looking for something to occupy my time after I was finished work.  I was an active duty Air Force Captain with my whole life ahead of me, but some luggage to drag along behind me.  That’s when a friend told me that his wife was teaching dance at a small dance studio in Towson called (what else?) – The Towson Dance Studio. 

 

     "I just looked at him as if he had three heads.

 

     “Me?  Dance?  You have got to be kidding!  That’s for ‘other’ people, you know, that LIKE that sort of thing.”

 

     "My friend told me it was my choice, but that his wife was teaching a Foxtrot lesson and I should at least check it out.  He even told me that he had taken some lessons.

 

     "From Fort Meade (where I was stationed) to Towson was about 40 miles AND I didn’t even want to go, but hey it had to be better than what I was doing – nothing.  So I left work that evening and went up to the studio to check out the group class.  It looked like a bunch of nice people socializing and learning something.  Hmmm, it actually looked like fun.

 

     "I knew there was a polka place nearby Fort Meade called Blob’s Park, so I signed up for the Polka Lessons at Towson Dance Studio and about a week later started to learn the Polka.  I went to Blob’s on the weekends, paid about 5 dollars (it was really cheap to get in back then), and danced the night away with women whose husbands could not dance.  The husbands were more than happy to have their wives dance with someone while they explored the beer tasting.  My self-esteem issue – eliminated. 

 

     "One night while I was taking a foxtrot lesson (I started to explore some of the other dances besides polka; after all I was not a one dance person), I met this young woman who was taking foxtrot with her male partner.  Her name was Kathy.  I knew that because when you changed partners, you usually introduced yourself.  I told her my name was Chris.  After that meeting, and after I found out that the male dance partner she brought was not her boyfriend, the romance blossomed.  We danced somewhere between two to three nights a week including the weekend dance party and took lessons at Towson’s other dance studio, the Glen Burnie Dance Studio.  We even took private lessons and learned the Viennese Waltz and Quick Step.  We were later wed and danced to the band that played at the club where we would spend time after dance classes doing (what else?) dancing.

 

"Soon we were getting up for every dance at the dance party and quickly learned to love dancing.  We strutted our stuff at the Fort Meade Officers’ Club, even performing Viennese Waltz during a club function.  Actually, no one else could dance to the music, so we just got up and did our thing.  The applause at the end was really gratifying.

    "Later, while stationed in Germany, Kathy and I took a trip to Austria and a tour of the SchlossSchönbrunn Palace in Vienna.  While in the main ballroom, the same location where dignitaries like President Kennedy met with Premier Kruschev in the 1960s,  we conveniently got “lost” from the tour group and danced the Viennese Waltz around the elegant ballroom with its elegant wood flooring (no furniture in there at the time) and immense crystal chandeliers.  I never thought I would feel so comfortable in a surrounding that was so elegant, but after talking with Kathy later, she felt the same way.  We might as well been there with me in a tux and her in a gown.  The feeling was something unique in our lives. 

     

    " Kathy and I met, fell in love, and danced our way into over 25 years of marriage.  In that amount of time, we have had our challenges, but through it all, we have always been able to hit the floor dancing.  We have taken dancing lessons in places like Italy, Germany, and a real foreign land – Pittsburgh PA.  When we retired from the military and ended up in Baltimore, we never quite found the time to return to dancing, but now we are back and enjoying it like we never left.  Dancing is something that we have in common.  If it weren’t for Towson Dance Studio and that chance meeting, Kathy and I would have never found each other and our fondness for dancing.  Thanks!

 

     "The two pictures below show Kathy and me strutting our stuff at my brother’s wedding in 1984.  The other photo is my two daughters,  now both college graduates and working, then (I think it was 1990 or so) just learning the basic steps.  Note how the younger one is in the lead position.  Some things never change."            

 

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July 2009:   College student discounts:   For the remainder of the summer, all college students can take any of our group classes, or attend our Saturday parties at half price!

 

Mar, 28:  A happy celebration of the end of the old and the prospect of the new!!

 

And...April 1, 2009...

A happy owner!!

 

 

Feb. 10, 2009  Dance Floors

              A huge topic, this, but I’ll try to limit my words to a small torrent.

              First, as to hardness: floors range from very resilient to rock hard.   The resilient ones are informally called “sprung floors,” a name that comes from floors actually laid on coiled springs.   Some are laid on a “basketweave” of 1 X 3’s or 1 X 4’s.   Another design is laid on a composite “spring pad”.    This is the system we will use.

              Next up in hardness are floors on one layer of sleepers (e.g., 2 X 4’s).   This lifts you up off the concrete but does not provide much spring.

            Then there are wooden floors, such as parquet or engineered flooring laid directly on concrete.    A step up in hardness is vinyl or linoleum laid directly on concrete, or even just concrete itself.

              But about the worst floor I have ever experienced for hardness is marble.   After conducting a three hour class on (beautiful) marble floors at the BMA years ago, I felt that my feet had been pulverized.

 

              The other main topic regarding floors is their surface finish.   About this there is as much agreement as there is for the ideal room temperature.   The main finishes are oil, polyurethane, wax, and no finish at all, each of which has its own fans.   I have danced on each of these and have found them all acceptable in some instances, and lousy in others.

              I must digress here to say that it is my considered opinion that the single greatest cause of slipping on a dance floor is:  the dancer.   Early in my career I complained to a fellow competitor (who happened to be the U. S. Champion!) about a competition floor (Detroit’s Cobo Hall) being slippery as grease.   He gave me a withering look and said, “all you have to do is keep your feet under your body.”   And that, in a nutshell, is the whole story: keep your feet under your body, or conversely, your body over your feet.   Add this to the nutshell: learn how to use the edges of your feet properly.

              Back to the topic – our floor will have a tung oil finish, which is a classic finish for dance floors.   Waxy shoes will be especially slippery on an oil finish, so, alas, new dance soles will be a necessity for all of us who have wax-impregnated shoes.

              Change of plans:  After extensive consideration and consultation with experienced people in the industry, I have decided to go with a water-based product, called Street Shoe XL.    It is a non-slippery, high durability finish that experienced dancers love.   It has little odor in application because of low volatile organic compounds (VOC's), and can be easily recoated as needed.   We have now tried this out and it feels wonderful to dance on.

               Waxy shoes still won't work well on this surface, so new dance soles are highly recommended.

              Many cobblers can re-sole your dance shoes.  I like Jack’s in Timonium, 9920 C York Rd, across from the Target.   He is expert and inexpensive.   I have arranged a discount with him for our private lesson students.   See your private lesson teacher for details.  

             

              The main point is that we will soon have a great new floor for you to dance on.

Feb. 1, 2009  Update

     Construction is under way!   But it's looking like mid March will be the more likely opening date, give or take a few weeks.  In the meantime, just so you know it's not a myth -- views of a ballroom to be!

 

 

 

Dec. 5, 2008 The New Towson Dance Studio:

     We’ve finally made the big decision!   Towson Dance Studio will move to new quarters – on or about Feb. 1, 2009.   The new location is 9486 Deereco Rd., just a block south of Padonia Rd., and immediately north of the Timonium Fairgrounds.

     We will have more announcements soon on the exact opening date festivities and plans for the new space, but for now, let’s just say that we are thrilled that we will be on the ground floor (no elevators!), parking will be greatly improved, and – best of all – we will have a new sprung maple floor, with no wax!  

    The premises are somewhat larger than we have now, allowing us to provide more space for teaching, and a larger ballroom.   However, we have been at some pains to make sure that the ballroom -- and our parties – do not lose the “cozy” feel that so many of you have said you would hate to lose.   We will say no more now, except to wait to see the design, which we think you will like!   More information will be forthcoming in the weeks that follow -- on driving directions, shoes, the floor, classes, parties.

    31 Allegheny has been our home for 34 years (the studio has actually been there for 47 years!), so this will be a “new world!”   We hope you will join us for our classes, lessons, and parties – at the new Towson Dance Studio in Timonium!

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